Monday, March 05, 2012

About
OpenXPS or XPS stands for XML Paper Specification. It is based on XML and it's a new electronic paper format originally developed by Microsoft and it serves as a PDF alternative. XPS files are usually created using "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" in Windows environments. It is now standardized as an open standard document format.

Quoting Wikipedia: An XPS file is in fact a Unicoded ZIP archive using the Open Packaging Conventions, containing the files which make up the document. These include an XML markup file for each page, text, embedded fonts, raster images, 2D vector graphics, as well as the digital rights management information. The contents of an XPS file can be examined simply by opening it in an application which supports ZIP files.

Evince already supports xps, but it has to be compiled with that option enabled. In order for evince (the program that allows you to read pdf document files) to read xps files, libgxps is required first.

Note: The evince version in Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot doesn't work with xps (segmentation fault when opening the file) and there are several packages to be backported. I've decided not to backport it. It works in Ubuntu 12.04 precise pangolin.
If you need to read an xps file, package libgxps-utils provides enough conversion tools, e.g. command:

Friday, March 02, 2012

This solution works for Windows operating systems as well as Linux distributions (It's actually system independent)
If you need to clear or define how many items the recent documents list bears, you can install this easy-to-use extension/addon/plugin: History manager for Libreoffice/Openoffice